Belly Dance: Orientalism—Exoticism—Self-Exoticism

Anthony Shay · Barbara Sellers‐Young

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Arts and Performance Studies Cultural Identity and Representation Cultural Studies and Colonialism

Abstract

The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences. (Said 1978,1) The past century has witnessed the phenomenon of belly dancing becoming a key icon of the Middle East in the West. This iconic representation often causes outrage, resentment, and even protest among Arabs who resent Westerners (mis)representing them by focusing on cabaret-style belly dance, a low-class and disreputable symbol for many in the Arab world, as a primary media image of the Middle East. Since the 1970s, millions of women and some men in the West have been attracted to belly dancing, investing millions of dollars and enormous time acquiring the basic skill of the dance in order to perform it. This essay will address several issues that are raised by the phenomenon of belly dancing and its transformation, globalization, and acculturation in the West; it is designed to develop a newly emerging area of performance/cultural research, drawing from the fields of dance and transnational studies.

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References

1993Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate.1977Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society.1996Orientalism: history, theory and the arts 1995Tango and the political economy of passion 1993Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate 2018Tango and the Political Economy of Passion 1997Mass culture and modernism in Egypt 1996Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution

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2006The Male Dancer in the Middle East and Central Asia 2011Exotic Identities: Dance, Difference, and Self-fashioning 2016Fantasies of Exposure: Belly Dancing, the Veil, and the Drag of History 2010Belly Dancing and the (En)Gendering of Ethnic Sexuality in the “Mixed” Brazilian Nation 2014Sequins, Sass, and Sisterhood: An Exploration of Older Women's Belly Dancing 2005Representing the belly-dancing body: feminism, orientalism, and the grotesque

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